SPAWN

SYNOPSIS:
Al Simmons (Michael Jai White) and Terry Fitzgerald (D.B.
Sweeney) are mercenary agents who work for A6, a secret agency
responsible for making political hits. Al's had enough killing,
though, and wants out, but his boss, Jason Wynn (Martin Sheen),
isn't willing to let him go. Instead, he and accomplice Jessica
Priest (Mindy Clarke) kill Al. This is to fulfil Wynn's deal with
The Violator (John Leguizamo), a demonic agent working for the
Devil who needs one soldier to lead Hell-bound souls to storm the
gates of Heaven. Al finds himself the unwilling choice for that
and returns five years later, a burned hulk of a man with a skin
that can turn into spiked armour and a fluid, ever-changing cape.
Learning that Wynn was responsible for his death and that Terry
has married Wanda (Theresa Randle), his former wife, the newly
named Spawn seeks revenge on Wynn. Count Cogliostro (Nicol
Williamson), an otherworldly agent for what's good and moral,
tries to talk Al out it. Wynn has rigged his heart with a
detonator linked to "Heat 16," a worldwide biological
weapon that will be set off, killing everyone on Earth, should
Wynn's heart stop beating. This would please the Violator and the
Devil as their army of souls would grow larger. Thus Spawn must
deal with his rage at Wynn, the Violator, and at having lost his
wife to his former partner.

"When Hollywood tries to adapt a dark and dingy comic book
into film, the results are invariably mixed and rarely work.
Occasionally, an attempt on such material can only be described
as, well, more woeful than mixed, and Spawn is the most woeful of
them all. From its convoluted plot ('plot' is an extreme
definition) to visual excesses and extraordinarily inept acting,
for want of a better word, Spawn is mainstream Hollywood cinema
at its worst, a self-indulgent, overly violent, utterly tasteless
piece of egotistical rubbish that can only be directed by a guy
called Mark A.Z. Dippé. With little to recommend it, except for
some infrequent dashes of sly humour, Spawn is a ridiculous mess
of a film, a work so dark and asinine that it forgets that an
audience needs not only to be entertained, but it needs
empathetic characters that are at least reasonably well defined.
This has none of that. Whatever it was that prompted Martin Sheen
to be a part of this mess had to have been very tempting indeed
(mind you, one of the more amusing moments is a wry reference to
an earlier Sheen classic, but nobody is likely to get the joke
anyway). John Leguizamo had promise, but here, as a dumpy,
foul-mouthed vile devil's handyman, he's appalling to the
extreme, while Michael Jai White in the title role ought to go
back to whatever it was he was doing before this movie came his
way: unemployment perhaps? Garishly directed with a script to
match, the conclusion of this cliched heaven v hell saga,
suggests a sequel may well be spawned. Heaven help us, or should
that be hell? Bring me the real apocalypse any day; surely it
couldn't be worse than sitting through this piece of cinematic
bile."Paul Fischer